Roughly speaking, the groups of real or fancied kindred among various low races exhibit the peculiarity that the kin-name is often inherited from the mother, not from the father; that the maternal blood is stronger in determining such cases of inheritance as arise; and that marriage is forbidden within the recognised limits of the _maternal_ kinship. It was natural for inquirers to derive this condition of affairs, this reckoning in the female line, from a state of society in which fatherhood (owing to promiscuity, or to polyandry--several husbands to one wife) was notably uncertain. Bachofen, who first examined the problem, attributed the system to a supposed period of the Supremacy of Women: McLennan to dubious fatherhood, and possible early promiscuity. The recovery of supremacy by men, or the gradual advance in civilisation, especially in accumulation of property, would finally cause descent to be reckoned through the male line, as among ourselves. As to the question of early promiscuity--sexual relations absolutely unregulated--Dr. Westermarck, Mr. Crawley, and others have argued, and Mr. Atkinson argues, that it never existed, at least to any wide extent, and with any potent influence. We hear rumours of savages utterly promiscuous, say the Mincopies of the Andaman Islands, just as we hear of savages utterly without religion. But later and better evidence proves that the Andamanese have both wives and a God.[14] Again, the lowest savages known are so far not ‘promiscuous,’ that they recognise certain sets of women as persons with whom (as a general rule, subject to occasional exceptions) certain sets of men must have no marital relations. It was the opinion of Mr. Darwin, as of Mr. Atkinson, that sexual jealousy, from the first, must probably have been a bar to absolute promiscuity, even among the hypothetical anthropoid ancestors of human race. To tell the truth, our evidence on these points, as to existing savages, is, as usual, contradictory.[15] WHAT IS EXOGAMY? DIFFICULTIES OF TERMINOLOGY